Chapter 8 Salvador Dalí Made It a Point to Steal Pens #2
Years ago, Gran had taken Lainey to the Minneapolis Institute of Art for a special exhibition of the French sculptor Camille Claudel.
The Waltz had awakened Lainey’s obsession with sculpture art.
To her, that piece was so much more than two figures dancing beneath a drape.
She hadn’t known bronze could convey that kind of vulnerability, movement, and magnitude.
She wanted to climb inside the dance. To exist within its tumultuous passion forever.
It returns to Paris at the end of the month, darling, Gran had explained.
Lainey hadn’t cared. She would’ve happily stowed herself away across an ocean for it.
Her little house, with its cold floors and poor roof drainage, was Elliot’s Claudel sculpture, and he was getting the chance to live inside it.
She looked at him, with his enthusiasm for something so singular as the angle of the kitchen skylight and the dramatic bands of glass around the living room, and for a moment, she was back at the beginning, under the gas station canopy, with a crush on the stranger in the olive-colored jacket.
She cleared her throat. “The bedroom on the right is empty. And there’s a dresser and wardrobe built in to the wall—which we’ve already covered.”
“Is he your favorite artist?” Elliot asked.
Lainey turned to face Elliot, who was standing in the doorway of her grandmother’s room. Which was now his room.
“Salvador Dalí,” he clarified. “With the anteater. Is he your favorite artist?”
“Oh.” She tilted her head side to side, weighing the question.
“Probably not, but maybe sometimes, I guess. He was super weird and brilliant. I saw a Jean-Michel Basquiat installation in high school that I’ve never fully gotten over, so he’s probably up there, too.
Or Camille Claudel. That’s sort of like asking what my favorite movie is.
It all depends on what I’m feeling and what I need. ”
His forehead creased, like he was filing away that information for later. “I know exactly what my favorite movie is. I have a list on my phone.”
He leaned his shoulder against the doorframe. The house she’d known for years looked smaller with him standing inside it like this. The ceiling and walls seemed to pull in around him, like even the room was drawn to him.
She lifted her chin. “I’ll bite. What is Elliot Hodges’s favorite movie?”
“Gladiator,” he answered confidently.
She couldn’t imagine a world where Russell Crowe fighting a tiger brought anyone comfort. “You’re telling me that no matter what mood you’re in—happy, sad, sick with the flu—you always want to fire up Gladiator?”
“My taste is consistent.”
“Do I dare ask what number two is?”
“Alien,” he answered, with a small adjustment to his glasses.
“Somehow, even more disturbing. But I do love H. R. Giger.”
“Don’t know who that is. But Ripley was my first crush.”
“He’s the Swiss surrealist sculptor who designed the alien,” she explained.
“Really,” he said, appreciatively, as though he was a little pleased to have collected a new piece of trivia about his second-favorite movie. She wondered if he would add it to his Notes list.
She stood there, waiting for something else to happen.
He lowered his arm from the doorframe and pointed to the front door. “I should bring my stuff inside.”
“Right. I’ll leave you to it. Good night,” she said, backing into her room and shutting the door.
Only after she was in there did she wonder whether he’d wanted her help unpacking the suitcases or the old-fashioned steamer trunk that he carted all the way from wherever he’d come from like a disinherited heiress.
Or whether his desire for her help should’ve mattered to her at all.
And only after she’d shut the door and said good night did she realize it was only five p.m.
The next morning, Lainey woke to the sounds of brutish grunting outside her door.
Not wanting a repeat of the threadbare T-shirt situation, she threw a hoodie over her top half and wandered into the hall, where she nearly tripped over a prone Elliot in blue running shorts and a baggy sweatshirt.
“Is this an attention-seeking thing? Like when a cat scratches at the door to be fed?”
“Was I loud?” he asked, his voice strained as he was holding a rigid plank position.
She high-stepped over him. “Was your performative grunting in front of my bedroom loud? No, not at all. I was already awake on account of all the burpees I was cranking out beneath your open window. I hope that wasn’t too disruptive for you.”
He collapsed into a kneel. “Sorry. I’m used to living alone. Next time, I’ll do this outside after my run.”
“You run, too?” It wasn’t much of a question. He had the muscled thighs of a man who possessed strong opinions on kinesiology tape and the rigid set to his shoulders reserved for evangelists of the elusive “runner’s high.”
“Yeah, do you?” He walked into the kitchen, panting.
“No. When you wake up every few days with knives driving into your skull, it’s difficult to pick up a running habit.
” Chainsaw sculpting, carpentry, and the general maintenance work she so often did to pick up extra cash was fairly physical work, so she’d managed to keep active despite her occasional bedbound days.
“I’d imagine so,” he responded, sounding genuinely sympathetic.
It surprised her and made her feel a bit like a bug under a microscope.
He knew so much about her—where she lived, her chronic health issues, where she purchased cheese—and all she knew about him was that he was an architect who didn’t like bars that played sports on the TV.
An unfamiliar gray water bottle sat on the counter, which he grabbed and took a long gulp from. It was starting. The slow takeover of her space. Soon, there would be other foreign objects floating around with an ulterior motive she wasn’t privy to.
He pulled the bottle away from his mouth and gasped for air. “I had a pull-up bar in my apartment, so I’m still trying to figure out a new routine without one.”
“If you want to install a pull-up bar, be my guest,” she said.
Against her will, images of shirtless pull-ups—right there in her kitchen—intruded into her thoughts.
But as she had no clue what was going on under that sweatshirt, the figure was more of a flexing, flesh-colored blob with Elliot’s grunting head atop it.
He set down his water bottle with a delicate smack.
“I can’t tell if you’re joking.” He searched her face.
There was no chance her thoughts were projected onto her forehead, was there?
“I can’t drill a pull-up bar into a Vincent Groff house.
Tell me you’ve never drilled holes into this place. ” Panic flashed in his eyes.
“No. I don’t think so.” He kept staring at her. Her blood pressure rose like a perp’s under the lights of an interrogation. “I don’t know! I can’t remember everything that’s ever happened here.”
“No holes from here on out,” he declared with a sense of finality. He scooped grounds into the coffee maker. “Do you want some?”
She nodded. “I need to go grocery shopping, but there’s oatmeal packets in the cabinet if you’re hungry.”
His shoulders seemed to relax by one degree. “That’d be really great. Moving forward, we can split the grocery bill if you want. Or do separate groceries.”
“Separate is probably best.” She squinted at the sweatshirt again, imagining how much it would cost to feed fifty percent of the man who wore it.
He pulled the packet out of the cabinet and gave it a shake. “I haven’t had oatmeal since I was a kid.”
“Really? That’s weird,” she hummed, meandering over to the dining table. “I can’t imagine you being a kid.”
“I suppose that’s a good thing.”
“I can only see you entering the world as a tiny adult, marching around the hospital, saying things like, ‘What is the meaning of this?’ and demanding to speak to the manager.”
He snorted, his face in the lower cabinet. “That’s exactly how it all went. Right down to the British accent.”
“No, that’s my East Coast erudite voice.”
He rifled through her cookware, settling on a medium-sized saucepan, and filled it with water. “Where do you think I’m from?” he asked, sounding uncharacteristically amused.
She pulled her sweatshirt sleeves over her hands, considering. “Massachusetts?”
He gasped, like she’d shot him.
She laughed. “Is Massachusetts bad?”
“Do I scream ‘Masshole’ to you?”
“I’m not familiar with your Massachusetts slander.
This is something East Coast folks need to work out among yourselves,” she explained, watching him struggle with her gas range.
“To be fair, I only know, like, three states. I had this awful teacher in the fourth grade who sent me down to the office every time she caught me staring out the window, so I have these weird gaps in my foundational knowledge. I know almost nothing about the American Revolution.”
She also lacked confidence with an analog clock, but she wasn’t about to admit every weakness Mrs. Leary’s zero-tolerance policy for “woolgathering” had left behind.
He tilted his head to examine her from the other side of the kitchen. “Is the American Revolution a subject most people know a lot about?”
“Apparently. Bree took me and my gran to see Hamilton on tour, and I couldn’t follow any of it. Just totally confused from minute one.”
“Don’t they rap everything that’s happening in painstaking detail?”
She huffed out a laugh. “Okay, I revealed something very vulnerable to you, and you have yet to tell me what state you grew up in.”
Air sputtered from his lips. “Fine. I grew up in New Jersey. Are you familiar?”
“New Jersey,” she repeated, as if that was the first she’d heard of it. “It’s pretty rich for you to be throwing stones at Massachusetts. But then again, my only source for your state culture is the Real Housewives. You know—” She tapped her chin. “That wasn’t the accent I thought I was detecting.”